1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a software defect prediction technique, and more particularly to provide a software defect prediction technique that is based on software development activities.
2. Description of Related Art
The common approaches used to predict defects of software development process are based on the maintenance records of software products which can be collected from different releases of software products. The prediction model built from collected data can be employed to predict the software defects. However, utilizing multiple release data to discover the defect patterns is that the features of the actions performed on different releases of products may be different owing to changes in resources in the project, and cannot be applied to in-process prediction.
Conventional defect prevention was first proposed by IBM Corporation to prevent future defects from occurring in its products. The main steps of defect prevention are a kickoff meeting, a causal analysis and an action item meeting. The causal analysis is an important step of the defect prevention process where the analysis meeting and interviewing with stakeholders are commonly used in this step. The most significant challenge for causal analysis is to identify the causes of defects among large amounts of defect records where the cause-effect diagram and control chart are utilized to support the analysis process.
The conventional defect prevention used to predict defects are based on the prediction models which are built from historic records of software work products. In addition to the work products, there are many factors which may cause defects, such as the experience of designer and development environment. To increase the prediction accuracy, these factors need to be considered.